Civil Liberties
1,361 Articles

Executive Order 12333, Notice, and the Due Process Rights of Criminal Defendants
In a world of electronic surveillance and secret searches, notice is more essential than ever. Notice allows criminal defendants to test whether the government’s evidence was,…

How Not to Authorize Force Against ISIS: A Response to Jack Goldsmith
Over at Lawfare, Jack Goldsmith appears to suggest that President Obama’s decision to authorize limited uses of force in Iraq underscores the need for an open-ended congressional…

Judge Bates (Unintentionally) Makes the Case for FISC Reform
Whatever one thinks of the Senate version of the USA FREEDOM Act–which offers a series of substantive and procedural reforms to U.S. surveillance programs–it is now…

Deferential D.C. Circuit Upholds Genital Searches at Guantánamo
I’ve written before about the potential significance of the Guantánamo “counsel access” case—Hatim v. Obama–which raised the question of whether…

Updated developments regarding FAA Section 702 and related matters
I’ve published a couple of posts here tracking some of the more important recent developments respecting Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. This post is an…

New Report on the Costs of NSA Surveillance
On the same day Senator Leahy introduced an updated USA FREEDOM Act [and don’t miss Jennifer Granick’s analysis of the bill], the New America Foundation‘s Open…

Sen. Leahy’s Latest NSA Bill: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
This morning, Senator Patrick Leahy released a new version of the USA Freedom Act, a bill intended to reform NSA surveillance following Edward Snowden’s revelations that the…

Senator Leahy Introduces Updated Version of the USA FREEDOM Act
This morning, Senator Leahy (D-Vt) introduced an updated version of the USA FREEDOM Act (full text). If you recall, in May, the House passed a version of the USA FREEDOM Act…

Status of Int’l Human Rights Law in Domestic Surveillance: What the HRW/ACLU report reveals about officials’ views
This morning, Human Rights Watch and the ACLU released a joint report on the chilling effects of domestic surveillance. The report examines, in particular, the impact of surveillance…

Overreading Lisa Monaco on AUMF Reform
Over at Lawfare, Bobby Chesney, Jack Goldsmith, Matt Waxman, and Ben Wittes have posted a reaction to a Josh Gerstein story in Politico, which was itself reporting on remarks…

All The Pieces Matter: Bulk(y) Collection Under §702
In a recent guest post, Chairman David Medine of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight board gamely responds to several questions about §702 surveillance posed by my co-blogger…

Rejoinder to David Cole
In his reply to my guest post of yesterday, David Cole criticizes me for offering an imperfect defense of counter-terrorism stings. Actually, his criticism does not go far…